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"Okay, Ray, I'm going to cycle the pressure." Tabitha announced.
Depressurization of the airlock started. I could hear a slight hissing at
first and then nothing. I checked my suit pressure one last time. Everything
was A-okay at about four pounds per square inch.
"The pressure gauge shows zero. I'm going to open the hatch." Tabitha called
out each step by the book. She grabbed the latch mechanism and the dual
pressure seals let loose without a sound. I didn't even feel it through my
EMU. I could see the payload bay through the hatchway.
"Entering the payload bay."
"Roger that," someone from Houston responded.
"Houston, this is Clemons. I am following the colonel into the bay."
"Go for EVA, Anson! HOSC online here!" Jim had just come back online down in
Huntsville. The warp probe components, soon to be call sign Zephram, was more
than ready out in the payload bay.
Several minutes of preparation and disconnecting and connecting things
followed next. Rayford piloted the Remote Manipulator Arm from inside the
Shuttle so that the end of the Arm seemed to hover ever present above or was
that below? us. Final disconnect process had been checked through for the
cylindrical warp field system and for one of the ECCs.
"Houston, we're ready to detach the containment system for the probe and ECC
number one."
Tabitha started to work with her powered ratchet and removed a set of bolts.
Once, just for fun, I held the ratchet on a bolt and turned it on while my
feet weren't planted to anything. I slowly began to spin about the bolt axis
in a clockwise fashion. Tabitha wasn't amused.
"Quit clowning around, Anson!"
"Hey, I paid for this ride. I'm going to get some fun out of it!" I joked.
She still wasn't amused. Getting back to business I tethered both of us to the
ECC as Rayford powered the Remote Manipulator Arm over to us. I worried with
catching the Arm and attaching it to the
ECC while Tabitha danced around like a busy bee in prime honey season
connecting this, undoing that, and fiddling with the other thing.
"That's good there, Ray. Houston, I have the Remote Manipulator Arm Platform
connected and
Tabitha and I are go for an egress from the payload bay." I waited for a reply
from Tabitha, Rayford, Houston and Huntsville, in any order.
"Roger that, Anson." Rayford said.
"Houston here. Go for ECC egress," Houston confirmed.
"Hunstville here. Roger that. Go for ECC egress," Jim replied.
"Tabitha, are all the ECC egress connectors locked?" Jim's voice came over the
UHF.
"Roger that. Connector cables linked and we are go."
Both of us were extremely busy. I really would've liked to have been able to
stop and take in the incredible view, but we had to make sure that each of the
three ECCs went through the same egress process and then were connected, via
special thin-walled telescopic titanium connector tubes about ten centimeters
in diameter each and ultra-strong polymer support cables about five
millimeters in diameter each, before letting them float out into space away
from the shuttle. Also, the main fuselage and spacecraft bus housing, the
central cylinder, would then have to be guided by the Arm, Tabitha on one
side, and me on the other making minor course corrections. We had to thread
the central cylinder through the three ECCs like a needle and thread. Once the
ECCs were in place, they looked like large ice cubes supported by toothpicks.
The toothpicks were in turn stuck into a large cylinder (an analogously scaled
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
object would be a toilet paper roll) about its circumference at
one-hundred-twenty-degree intervals. They were also closer to one end of the
cylinder than the other.
Being an astronaut nowadays is more like construction work than the glory of
flying high-tech spacecraft. Tabitha and I had been turning bolts and making
electrical connections for the better part of three hours. It was time for a
scheduled break.
Tethered to the probe, Tabitha and I watched as the Arm disconnected from us
and folded back toward the payload bay. An incomplete Zephram, Tabitha, and
myself simply floated there above the shuttle, Newton's Laws still being in
effect.
"Rayford, you drive that thing like a pro," I teased as he locked onto the
final component of the probe, the ACS Fuel Supply and Science Instrument Suite
Sphere. Tabitha and I watched and panted trying to catch our breath in the
thin atmosphere of our EVA suits. Rayford manipulated the Arm right into the
sweet spot of the universal connector on the probe component. The tank grabbed
back at the arm and was connected. The internal circuitry kicked in and blew
the circuit breakers for the other connectors around the tank. In a matter of
seconds the tank was free from the Shuttle other than at the connection with
the Arm.
About fifteen minutes had passed and Tabitha and I had caught as much of our
breath as you can at about a third of atmospheric pressure. Although the PLSS
pumps an oxygen rich environment into the suit, it's still like snow skiing,
wrestling a bear, running a marathon, and attacking Mount Everest all at the
same time. EVA astronauts had better be in shape. All that cardio kickboxing
had paid off for me. All the extracurricular activities with Tabitha didn't
hurt either.
"Until you've done it, you can't imagine it." Tabitha had told me that a
thousand times about astronaut stuff. It turns out that she was right about
this one. Actually, she was right about it all, but I didn't tell her that.
She's cocky enough as it is.
I connected a cable to the major portion of Zephram and then thrusted my way
over to the upcoming final component. The Arm had halted about two meters from
us. I slowed my descent to the Tank and lightly touched down on it. I had
lined up on the hook perfectly. I grabbed the handhold with one hand and
snapped the carabineer on the hook with the other. This was a lot easier than
working in the neutral buoyancy tank in Houston you can move quicker. Some
astronauts had told me that the difference would be hard to get used to. I
couldn't understand why. It seemed more natural to me not to have the
resistance from the water.
"Probe tank is secure. Release the Arm." I said over the UHF.
"That was good work, Doc!" Jim said over the comm.
"Thanks, Jim. Preparing cable engage and final component attach!" The motor on
the other end of the cable started spinning. Tabitha ran the motor as she
pulled the two parts of the spacecraft together, slowly pulling us together.
As Tabitha and I slowly maneuvered the two spacecraft parts together, the
Shuttle began slowly pulling away from us. Neither of us were concerned since
this was part of yet another NASA scheduled event. As we began connecting the
components of the probe, we would need to power them up. The immense [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
